With this blog, I am planning to offer, as regularly as possible, critical observations on the scholarly and popular literature analyzing the nature of archives or contributing to our understanding of archives in society. I hope this blog will be of assistance to anyone, especially faculty and graduate students, interested in understanding archives and their importance to society.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Walter Benjamin and Archives

It is difficult these days to read anything about literary and cultural texts without finding a citation to Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Despite the loss of a quantity of his papers, Benjamin left behind enough publications and working documents to ensure the continuing influence of his ideas. With the publication of Ursula Mark Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, and Erdmut Wizisla, eds., Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, translated by Esther Leslie (New York: Verso, 2007), we understand something of how Benjamin worked to ensure that his personal papers would survive. This book was originally published in German in 2006 as part of an exhibition at the Berlin Academy of Arts.

This beautifully illustrated book brings to life the creation of the personal archives of an important twentieth-century scholar. The editors discuss – with the aid of illustrated examples and ample quotations from Benjamin’s writings – Benjamin’s own “strategic calculation” in preserving his archives through “which he deposited his manuscripts, notebooks, and printed papers in the custody of friends and acquaintances in various countries. His archives landed in the hands of others, so that their documents might be delivered to posterity. Those who received his work accepted the obligatory nature of their roles and faithfully conserved the papers.” Benjamin, it seems, possessed the “ethos of an archivist” (p. 1). And what we see in this book about Benjamin is how an individual, working before the advent of the computer, might create, organize, use, manage, and preserve his personal papers.

Although Benjamin had the sense of the archivist in his work, it is still quite different from the traditional or “institutionalized archives”: “Order, efficiency, completeness, and objectivity are the principles of archival work. In contrast to this, Benjamin’s archives reveal the passions of the collector” (pp. 1-2). The editors of this volume examine many of the various features of his archives, including the personal catalogs he developed, the photographs he took and maintained of his collections (such as his toys), the evolution of the language development of his son, how he utilized notebooks, his collecting of photographic postcards, the collection of games and riddles, and so forth. “Benjamin’s mode of working is marked by the techniques of archiving, collecting, and constructing,” the editors conclude. “Excerpts, transpositions, cuttings-out, montaging, sticking, cataloguing and sorting appear to be true activities of an author” (p. 4). This is a wonderful glimpse into how an individual, albeit from an ordinary person, conceived and executed a plan for his personal archives.

Another wonderful appreciation by you, Richard. Thanks for it. Benjamin's work on the archive, and making records, in an age of mechanical reproduction, has inspired contemporary archival thinker, like Joanna Sassoon, in considering the value lodged in the materiality of the record. The book underlines too that archivists, in understandably wishing to impose order, logic, rationality, system, evidence qualities, on institutional records, especially digital records, may too easily dismiss the value found in dis-order, overlook the "evidence" revealed by a collector's idiosyncracies, and be blind to collecting and hoarding passions, all of which can reveal much about the values of the person's life.

About Me

Richard J. Cox is Professor in Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences where he is responsible for the archives concentration in the Master's in Library Science degree and the Ph.D. degree. He has been a member of the Society of American Archivists Council from 1986 through 1989. Dr. Cox also served as Editor of the American Archivist from 1991 through 1995, the Society’s Publications Editor from 2002 to 2006, and he is presently editor of the Records & Information Management Report. He has written extensively on archival and records management topics and has published fourteen books in this area, winning the Society’s Waldo G. Leland Award in 1991, 2002, and 2005. He is presently working on new books on professional education and personal recordkeeping. Dr. Cox was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists in 1989.